The Knack - Get The Knack

If you’re young, it’s hard to explain just how much controversy Get The Knack stirred up when it was originally released. First of all, there was the leadoff single “My Sharona,” a song so awesome that it was played every 90 minutes on Top 40 radio while it was requested every 10 minutes. It was a song so huge that everything paled in comparison. It was a song so huge that every critic, novice or professional, looked for any detail to latch on to.
And Get The Knack provided them with plenty to work from, starting with Doug Fieger’s offensive, occasionally misogynistic lyrics that, when you take a deep breath, were the same topics that rock music’s foundation was based on. The difference? Fieger incorporated shit like “she’s sitting on your face” and “don’t fuckame fuckame today” while the old bluesmen used cutesy metaphors like “squeeze my lemon.”
On top of that, Fieger had a keen sense of humor, adding a barely audile “It hurts!” after the “sittin’ on your face” comment and including a song about Siamese twins that plead for someone to kill the other sibling.
The critics won. In a year, the backlash was in full swing and “Knuke the Knack” buttons were selling more than the band’s follow up …But The Little Girls Understand. Nobody gave a shit by the time Round Trip was released and the band is now fodder for those “one hit wonder” jokes even when the band actually charted four top 40 singles in their lifetime.
Quibbling aside, the real proof is in actually playing Get The Knack, an album great enough for practically anyone to recognize.
This is power pop with a capital “P” delivered in twelve tracks of impeccably performed and wonderfully captured glory, hinting at the reality that these guys worked long hours honing their craft and solidifying their arrangements. The album plays like a tight setlist, ebbing and flowing with stunning efficiency, each track sounding just as memorable as the last.
I won’t even address the other criticism, trivial potshots at the cover art and blatant Beatlesque poses, which hundreds of other bands are equally as guilty of. The Knack was nowhere near as great as the Beatles were, but they did manage to make an album as great as Meet The Beatles.
Whether it’s a case of believing their own hype or letting it destroy them, The Knack were never able to rebound from the backlash. But before they let them get their hands on ‘em, they did manage to release on of the greatest debuts in history, one that was unfairly pegged as a pre-packaged blueprint.
The reality was that Get The Knack was a legitimate document of a band blessed with twelve great songs that were religiously rehearsed and tremendously catchy. Whether or not they deserved their demise is one thing, but Get The Knack proves that they certainly deserved their initial success.